BULGARIAN BEST-SELLER POISED FOR ENGLISH DEBUT

The world is full of bartenders hoping for something grander -- actors waiting for their first big part, musicians waiting for their first big hit.

In San Diego there’s a bartender who is already a big deal. In Bulgaria.

His name is Zachary Karabashliev. He’s 44. He lives in Mira Mesa and mixes drinks at the Sheraton downtown, where it seems fair to say not many people know that back in his homeland he’s a prizewinning novelist, short-story author and playwright.

Now he’s poised to make a splash here.

On Jan. 29, his 2008 debut novel, “18% Gray,” will be published in English for the first time. The translation is part of an ongoing effort by a small, nonprofit publishing house at the University of Rochester in New York to expose American readers to literature written elsewhere. Only about 3 percent of all books published in this country are translations.

Voted by Bulgarian readers as one of their favorite 100 books of all time, the novel opens in a fictionalized San Diego. The main character, also named Zack, has a newly broken heart. Drowning his sorrows in Tijuana, he escapes a kidnapping and winds up with a 60-pound bag of marijuana in his car trunk.

The best person he knows to help him unload the pot lives in New York, so he sets off across the country on a journey that’s wildly dangerous and oddly healing. His car gets stolen, rear-ended, towed for a parking violation. He drinks a lot of espressos and dirty martinis, takes a lot of photographs. He helps a suicidal woman. He accidentally goes into the wrong motel room and climbs into bed, startling the occupant. Who has a gun.

All that’s interspersed with flashbacks to his life with Stella, an artist he fell in love with in Bulgaria and eventually married. And then she left him.

If the story sounds absurd and darkly funny — well, it is. Sitting one recent morning in a cafe in University Heights, Karabashliev admitted he has a healthy appetite for both.

But what, he wanted to know, could be more absurd than his own journey? He’s a Bulgarian who came to America only to become known in Bulgaria for writing a story in America.

A story in America written in Bulgarian.

That is now being translated from Bulgarian to English. And is being adapted, by him, into a movie.

“What a weird way to make a living,” he said.

Winning the lottery

Karabashliev always knew that one day he would come to America. Maybe it was all those books about cowboys and Indians he read as a child.

He got a college degree in literature and went to work for Coca-Cola, opening new markets for the soft-drink giant at a time of waning Communist influence in Bulgaria. It was, he said, his first brush with the power of America as something more than a place. An idea. A promise.

A two-liter bottle of Coke cost about $1.50, he said, in an economy where the salary for a schoolteacher was $11 a month. “That’s a big investment to drink a bottle of Coke, and I was moving product,” he said. “It was unreal. I still laugh about it. I think people just wanted to live normal lives. We were kind of in denial.”